The communications industry is rapidly changing to adjust to emerging technologies and ever increasing customer demand. This customer demand for new applications and increased performance of existing applications is driving communications network and system providers to employ networks and systems having greater speed and capacity (e.g., greater bandwidth). In trying to achieve these goals, a common approach taken by many communications providers is to use packet switching technology.
Consumers and designers of these systems typically desire high reliability and increased performance at a reasonable price. A commonly used technique for helping to achieve this goal is for these systems to provide multiple paths between a source and a destination. Packets of information are then dynamically routed and distributed among these multiple paths. It is typically more cost-effective to provide multiple slower rate links or switching paths, than to provide a single higher rate path. Such designs also achieve other desired performance characteristics.
Under certain circumstances and typically for a limited duration, these switching systems can have internal congestion as well as congestion at the output ports. The amount of the congestion can be decreased if the traffic sources stop or decrease sending packets for a period of time over the congested paths or to the congested output ports. However, to react to such congestion and to decrease or stop sending such information, these traffic sources (e.g., sending ports, line cards, etc.) must be notified to stop or decrease their sending of packets by some element recognizing the congestion.
In a conventional, directly connected point-to-point application, a receiver will throttle a sender by communicating flow control information directly to the sender (e.g., XOFF, XON etc.). In this example, the receiver has full information and can know when to stop, slow down, speed up, or resume the sending of traffic between the sender and receiver. However, when a packet switch is interposed between a sender and receiver, the receiver may no longer have the complete and timely information necessary to make such flow control decisions, especially when the congestion is within the interposed packet switch. This problem of identifying congestion is compounded when packets belonging to the same information stream are distributed among multiple paths and switching elements within the packet switching system. In this scenario, no single element inherently has the information necessary to timely react to congestion.
New methods and apparatus are needed to efficiently recognize actual and potential congestion situations within a packet switching system and to communicate appropriate flow control information to sending elements or devices.